U-M students teach professors about research commercialization

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—They say the best learning comes from teaching and doing,
so a new course being offered to business students at the University of Michigan
should be very educational indeed.

Undergraduate and graduate students at Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of
Business have spent the semester consulting with scientists at U-M and Michigan
State University to help them develop their research ideas into something that
might become a business.

The faculty receive some free coaching, and the students get a strong taste
for setting off into uncharted territory, said David Brophy, an associate professor
of finance and director of the Ross School's Center for Venture Capital and
Private Equity, who developed the course. "They are experiencing life
in the unstructured world of research commercialization."

Or to put it more bluntly: "Staring into the abyss is really useful for
some people," said MBA student Andrew McColm, who has been working with
Dr. David Humes in the U-M Medical School to develop an implantable device
filled with living cells to treat Type 1 diabetes.

"I learned a lot more from this than reading a book," said evening
MBA student Ryan Gunderson, who is on the same team as McColm. "It's like
a mini-internship."

The innovative class puts the business students into teams with mentors—area
businesspeople who have some entrepreneurial experience. And together, these
teams work with researchers to develop commercial ideas, under the immediate
supervision of Erick Trombley, the class "drill sergeant."

Projects the students have worked on include a new way of producing hydrogen
on-site in small quantities, growing bacteria that produce an important chemical
feedstock, an improved type of welding for medical devices and aerospace, and
a nanotechnology delivery system for drugs.

What faculty learn is that business works on a different time scale than the
sometimes-glacial academic world.

"These students literally pushed me, dragged me, to define ways this
could be done now, rather than within the five-year goal I had set," said
Dr. Josef Miller of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute, whose idea is a
medication that could prevent hearing loss from loud noise.

Miller is no stranger to commercialization, having been the lead inventor
at the University of Washington on the idea that became the Sonicare toothbrush.
But the coaching is still very useful to him as he pursues his latest ideas.

"Every time you go through this process, it's like a birth, and no two
are quite alike," Miller said.

What the students will produce at the end of the class on Dec. 7 isn't a
full-fledged business plan, but rather the start of a plan.

"Here's the pain; here's the pain medicine. Who wants it and what will
they pay?" Brophy said.

That sort of hard-nosed business analysis is key to the commercialization
of research, said James Richter of the Michigan Research Institute (MRI), a
nonprofit research institute in Ann Arbor. He has been both a mentor of student
teams and a co-developer of the course with Brophy. MRI obtained a U.S. Department
of Labor grant to help fund the course at U-M.

"I've been in meetings with university presidents and the venture capital
community, and the first thing the presidents always ask is 'Why aren't you
commercializing our technologies?'" Richter said. The usual answer, he
said, is that the university has just a technology, not a business plan that
will bring it to market.

Crossing that gap between the money people and the lab people has become
the bottleneck of technology transfer, said Matthew Pickus, an Ann Arbor business
consultant who has served as a mentor for the class.

The hope is that the time and talent of U-M business students might "jump
start that process," Richter said.

Richter and Brophy will measure the outcomes with the students, asking whether
the experience of Finance 629 has changed their minds about entrepreneurship,
or shown them the challenges and rewards of the entrepreneurial pursuit. Spawning
a few licensing agreements or startup companies would be even better, of course.

Miller thinks his hearing loss drug might become a marketable business idea
in a year or 18 months, thanks in no small part to the work the students have
put into it.

"Now I understand how much work it really is," said first-year
BBA student Tristan Peitz. "It's really not that easy to start a company."